îl!r jiìortlniib (Obseruer
Page 6
A p ril 13. 2011
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Welcome to the Overt Class Warfare
When the most
vulnerable are
thrown overbroad
In Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, and Mis­
souri state legislators and governors are enact­
ing or proposing measures to cut the number of
weeks the jobless can receive unemployment
benefits.
The jobless can now receive benefits for up
by L ee A. D aniels
to 26 weeks via regular benefit programs; most
Have I become hard of hearing?
of the legislation enacted and the proposals
Or is it true that the paeans to the
would cut it to 20 weeks.
middle class - their being exalted
This is where Middle-Class America comes
as “the backbone” of America -
in, because the great bulk of the jobless —
have disappeared from the political arena?
which now number more than 14 million, more
It certainly seems so that the fulsome praise than 6 million of whom have been out of work
which once resounded so loudly on the cam­ longer than 26 weeks - had jobs that paid
paign trails and in the halls of Congress and middle-class wages.
state legislatures among a certain set of politi­
Once these people were targeted for prepos­
cians and ideologues is now all but officially terous easy credit offers — no-down-payment-
taboo.
needed mortgages, and whiz-bang, can’t-miss
That’s understandable, of course. After all, stock deals -- many of which were just glorified
one can’t smoothly praise the supposedly great scams given a cover of respectability by the
American middle class while one is trying to rhetoric of laissez-faire capitalism. Now, the
shove a great many of the them overboard.
middle class is condemned by conservatives for
W e’re now being subjected to the latest its conspicuous consumption, greed and indo­
political fever: the craze to appear fiscally pru­ lence.
dent by throwing the most vulnerable among us
After all, who are those public school teach­
- those out of work - overboard.
ers, government bureaucrats and employees of
The economy remains in deep trouble. The government-run social service programs, and
deficit is burgeoning. The champions of laissez- police officers and firefighters now being pillo­
faire capitalism, papering over the fact that their ried by the fiscal Savonarolas but middle-class
boosting of laissez-faire capitalist policies helped Americans.
produce this mess, now declare their commit­
Welcome to the overt class war, where the
ment to fiscal sobriety - as long as others are rhetoric of fiscal responsibility - from politi­
made the sacrificial goats.
cians who ran their campaigns for office at a
deficit and are now fund-raising to have other
people pay off their debts - can’t disguise the
ideological rigidity and callousness at work.
It’s what I call the Titanic complex. I draw the
concept from the book sociologist Ruth Sidel
published in the mid-1990s. Keeping Women
and Children Last: Am erica’s War on the Poor.
In her introduction, Sidel wrote about the bitter
facts that are often glossed over in the^elling of
the tragedy: that because the great ocean liner,
considered by its builders unsinkable, didn’t
have enough lifeboats for all its 2,200 passen­
gers, a fierce class dynamic determined who
survived and who perished once it met its des­
tiny in the North Atlantic.
“Among first and second class passengers,
only 8 percent of the women drow ned...” Sidel
notes, “[but] in steerage 45 percent of the women
perished.... only one child of the 30 children in
first and second class died, while in steerage 53
of the 76 children, 70 percent, drowned. Further­
more, there is clear evidence th a t... many [pas­
sengers] in steerage were purposely prevented
from reaching the decks that housed their only
hope of survival.”
Just as the selection process for who was to
survive that great tragedy was class-driven and
unjust, so are the craven actions of those carry­
ing out today’s war against the unemployed.
Lee A. Daniels is Director o f Communica­
tions fo r the NAA CP Legal Defense and Educa­
tio n a l F u n d a n d E d ito r -in -C h ie f o f
TheDefendersOnline.